Think Pink

I've had two spectacular guided days this fall. Early in the pink salmon season I fished the Skykomish with guide Chris Senyohl in October. These were the first pinks I caught on a fly. I used his sinking line 6-weight and flies he tied -- pink ones.

This is a nice bright female pink. Probably the one I took home for dinner. If they are bled immediately and kept cold they are quite good to eat. I caught a bunch and took two home for dinner.

This is the male humpy, caught that evening after a significant rain storm. It was very cool to be out on the river during the dump.

Yesterday I spent the day on the Sauk River, which empties into the Skagit. It's a great bull trout and steelhead river. I caught a couple of nice bull trout on a Spey or Skagit rod, but my friend Scott Hood landed the most and the biggest fish. Scott is the head of Trout Unlimited in Oklahoma and on the TU board of trustees. It was a real honor to fish with him. We estimated the bull trout below to be about 25-inches.

We both fished Skagit rods. He had a black fly and I had a white and later a grey fly. Our guide, Andrew Grillos, put us on the fish and paddled a mean rubber boat all day. I fished the Skagit with him two years ago. He taught me two-handed casting and how to fish for bull trout and steelhead.

I highly recommend both Chris and Andrew.

Brook trout on the Middle Fork

After hunting for brook trout in the Snoqualmie forks for some time now, I finally caught my first brooky this morning on the upper Middle Fork.

Several spirited cutthroat took dry flies throughout the morning, but I decided to try a small nymph in a deep pool just behind a monster bolder with a beautiful flow spilling in from both sides. It didn't make sense there that I was not getting a fish so I switched from the dry to the nymph.

It was a short cast, and I let the fly sink slowly for a very long time. With the current I could see that the fly was circling its way down into the depth when I felt a strong tug and a good fight.

At first I thought it was a 9-10 inch cutt, but as it came out of the water I noticed the attractive and very distinctive splotches of yellow, orange and red circled with a blue ring. The fish is easily one of the most beautiful, and 9-10 inches is not bad for a brook in these waters.

As any self-respective trout fisherman knows, the brook is not actually a trout but a charr. Lake trout and the beautiful Dolly Varden are also char.

Below is one of the cutthroat trout I caught this morning. The water is about 225 cfs today -- a little higher than it was a year ago at this time due to some rain earlier in the week.

Down a steep ravine in the valley is the Middle Fork.

Agony & Ecstasy

I headed out this afternoon to the North and the Middle Forks of the Snoqualmie. The weather is cloudy and cool in the morning and then magnificent in the afternoon starting around 1 pm.

The North Fork is at about 130 cfs and the Middle Fork is about 410 cfs. They are nicely wadeable now.

Not much to report on the North Fork. I hooked a couple of small cutthroat and rainbows but landed none.

The real story is the Middle Fork. After a lackluster experience on the North Fork I drove a short distance to my favorite spot on the Middle and caught a very pretty 12" Rainbow on a Stimulator quickly. I cast a short distance into the seam of a run and the fish hit it pretty good. 

I spent the next hour wading downstream and not catching anything. The shadows were growing on the far-side of the stream so I waded out into some bolders and cast a good distance out into a narrow part of the stream beneath some trees. I was using a dry fly when I saw the biggest trout I've ever seen in this river leap from the water to try and nail my fly. I would say the fish was 15-16" and fat. 

I cast a couple more times when I saw the fly disappear and the line tighten. I knew the fish was heavy because the flyline actually burned my finger.  I striped it in a few times but lost the fish. I think I fought rather than simply raising the rod and letting the fish hook itself a little better. Good fish-finding but poor technique on my part. I really regretted missing this one.

But it was a great day on the river.

Poking fun

My kids like to make fun of my interest in fishing. They know that if water is nearby I am wondering if there are fish.

The result is some pretty funny memes they've created.

Phantom Lake Bass

Phantom Lake is on the way home, and I've often wondered if it holds fish. By summertime the lily pads are so thick and the brambles so dense it's hard to see how one would actually access the water.

But yesterday I had an hour to spare and decided to try. I drug my float tube to a small clearing on the western edge and began kicking my way through the thicket until I found a little passageway out into the open lake. It was sunny and warm. No one was on the lake as I began casting a 5-weight with a brown Woolly Bugger back toward the lily pads.

There was no sign of fish but I had read several years ago an old post about someone catching bass in this lake. I cast for about 15 minutes with nothing. But then I slowed my retrieve a little and I felt the line tense. At first I thought I'd hooked the lily pad but then it began to quiver and I knew I had something on. Up came a one-pound black bass. I was thrilled to see the lake still had fish.

I switched over to a green popper and quickly had another largemouth, though this one was a little smaller.

By now it was time to get home so I headed back to my little passageway into the brambles and tried there before entering. There was some varied vegetation in this area and I must admit that a perfect cast was not wasted. I saw a boil and then a decent 1.5 pound black jumped out of the water for the popper. It fought pretty well and I snapped this photo below.

June and July have been good for bass. I caught a rock bass in Centralia last weekend in a river there. And I've written about the smallmouth bass I caught in Sammamish.

I am ready to get back to some trout fishing when time permits. I am partial to the beautiful streams where trout live and their more thrilling runs and fights.

Smallmouth on Sammamish

The air is starting to warm up this late May. Sixty counts as a good spring day in these parts. No wind and the American Bald Eagles were fishing low to the water today.

I took out my Outcast Fat Cat float tube in search of smallmouth bass, perch and maybe a cutthroat or kokanee. I saw plenty of little kokanee fry splashing around on this cloudy Sunday afternoon. I looked for smallmouth around the ample boat docks on the South end of Lake Sammamish.

I thought I felt a little tug at the end of one boat dock but that was about it for a solid hour or so. Finally I headed back to my launch point where there is a heavily wooded area with lots of submerged roots and fallen trees.

I had a 6-weight with an intermediate tip but set it aside and went with my Winston 5-weight we a brown Woolly Bugger. I cast back into some fallen trees and finally felt a convincing bite. I set the hook and found this little guy, a perch of some sort. (Might be a crappie.) Not a great fighter but a pretty fish.

Within a cast or two I noticed some fry jumping close to a bramble of trees and I cast just about where I saw the last splash. The take was not a crushing blow but my 5-weight doubled over pretty good. Once the fish realized he was hooked the rod tripled over and line began to peel off the reel. I suspected at this point that I had my first smallmouth on a fly. I really wanted to land this one so I played him, letting the fish make run after run.

The fish was probably 15 inches and fat, likely a pound and a half.

This opens up some new fishing for me nearby. I hear they also are on Lake Washington so I will give that a try as well.

No, I didn't keep anything. It's more fun to catch 'em, shoot 'em and let 'em go.

Winter wanderings

I am not going to kid you. Winter fishing is just very hard for me. I don't catch a lot of fish between January and March. And the the truth be known I would catch even fewer if not for trips to Oklahoma in November and December.

I finally got around this week to downloading some old photos. Dad, Ryan and I fished over Christmas break on the Lower Illinois in northeast Oklahoma. It's nice to see Ry and Dad geared up in the parking lot...

...and as we walk down the path to find a beat below the dam. Walking that path is now one of my favorite walks in the world.

On Feb. 10 I fished with the wonderful and notable flyfishing guide, John Farrar. This a great photo of him in his Canadian-built boat on the Skagit, where we fished for Dollies and Steelhead. One of the guys in our group caught a couple of Dollies but we didn't get into any Steelhead. Nevertheless, it was a great trip and I got some good instruction on the Snap-T spey cast.

Over the kids' mid-winter break I fished for surf perch near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Nada.

I did manage to catch a dozen or so rainbows at Lake Alice near Fall City in Washington state. I took my Fat Cat float tube out on a sunny Sunday and did quite well with a brownish wooly bugger.

Lake Alice.....

Sea-run cutthroats on Puget Sound

My dad and I fished the south Sound on April 22. Our guide, Chris Senyohl, did a fantastic job of getting us into fish quickly.

Our biggest of the day were 18" and 19". We also caught plenty of 12-13 inchers.

We fished almost exclusively a clouser pattern.

As the photos show, the weather was great. We finished an outgoing morning tide and the very early stages of an afternoon incoming tide.

My first year with a flyrod

FlyRod & Reel magazine each year publishes the 1st place winner of the Robert Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award. A compilation of these wonderful fishing stories is available in a book entitled, In Hemingway's Meadow.

Last year I entered the contest with a submission about my first year of fly-fishing. I didn't win, and when I opened the Autumn 2012 edition of FlyRod & Reel magazine to see Dave Karczynski's entry, "Awake in the Moonlight: Notes at Hex time," I understood why.

May 29, 2012

Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award

Fly Rod & Reel Magazine
P.O. Box 370
Camden, Maine  04843

Dear Sirs:

I am new to fly-fishing, but not fishing.  As you will learn from my essay, which I respectfully submit for your consideration, the culture and the sport itself have drawn me unexpectedly to the Robert Traver writing contest.

Just two days after my conversion to the sport, which I write about, I discovered references to Trout Madness. I could not purchase it quickly enough in Seattle, and had to venture into the open sea of the Internet to find a used copy offered for $5.97 by the Goodwill of Southwest Florida.  Amazon’s shipping and handling added another $3.99, but within days I had my prized catch for just under $10 bucks.

Quotes and other sentiments of Mr. Traver speckle my essay like the trout I enjoy fishing for.  I only made the connection mid-way through my essay that the author of Trout Madness was also John D. Voelker.  Soon my wife and I were watching Jimmy Stewart walk through the door of his house in Anatomy of a Murder.  “Look,” I told my wife, “he’s carrying fly rods and newly caught trout!”

And so, regardless of the outcome of this contest, I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience both of learning about Mr. Traver and constructing an essay that I hope you enjoy.

Sincerely,

Greg Shaw
Washington state

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“Remember," as my father kept saying, "it is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm…."
                                                                            --Norman Maclean

1.

This is the story, set to my own four count rhythm, of a first year fly fishing.  But this fish story starts, of all places, not in the water but on a baseball diamond.  In the country, where I lived and grew up in rural Oklahoma, baseball and fishing went together like fried chicken and church on Sunday.  If we weren’t working we were on a ball field, a farm pond or a creek bed.  I remember being happily surprised the first time I learned that Ted Williams had become a world-class fisherman after his retirement from the Boston Red Sox. Baseball is a sport that has inspired writers in much the same way fly fishing has.  In fact, I’d like to weigh these respective bookshelves to see which genre has the edge. Pitcher and writer Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four, "You spend your whole life gripping a baseball, and at the end you realize that it was the other way around."    Do we grip what we love or does what we love grip us?  In such an economical, literary way Bouton reminds us of the self-absorption of our youth and the inevitable realization later in life that our history and our culture reach out through the generations (and, yes, the waters) to grab us and hold us fast.

I got to thinking about that the other day as the Winston 5-weight fly rod I was gripping bent and twitched against the fight of a small coastal cutthroat trout on the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River in Washington state.  In my left hand I held the familiar cork handle of a graphite rod and in my fingers ran a silky fly line which stretched out into the oblivion of cold water beyond a submerged boulder. There in the rushing water of a Cascades snowmelt, a freckled trout – a good size one for this stream -- had attacked my Hare’s Ear. The cutt dove deep into a pool and then rose to the surface as my rod tip reached for the sky.